Screening and monitoring assays are essential for the early detection and management of cancer. Cancer screening and monitoring tests, such as blood tests collected in a medical environment, can be used for large-scale screening of clinically healthy (or “asymptomatic”) individuals, for diagnosis, for prediction tests or for disease monitoring in subjects.
The advantage of blood-based remote samples for such applications is that it is very convenient for a subject to provide a sample, and therefore compliance is much higher in a test population. In the case of colorectal cancer, less than 20% of people at risk are screened, mainly due to psychological barriers induced by uncomfortable and invasive screening methodologies, such as colonoscopy.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for approaches that afford early detection and treatment of solid tumors, such as colorectal cancer, that have the added benefit of being cost-effective, rapid, and minimally invasive, preferably noninvasive. Additional utility allows for prognosis of cancers, monitoring subject treatment of cancers, and detecting relapse of cancers, as well as the discovery of new therapeutic interventions for treating cancers, such as solid tumors.